An Angel at My Table
First screened and reviewed in February 1999 / Most recently screened in July 2017
Director: Jane Campion. Cast: Kerry Fox, Alexia Keough, Karen Fergusson, Kevin J. Wilson, Samantha Townsley, Iris Churn. Screenplay: Laura Jones (based on the autobiographies To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City by Janet Frame).

 Twitter Capsule: I didn't get this at 20. I'm glad I do now. A heroic tribute to shyness, oddity, and life-saving creativity.

VOR: ⑤  Remarkable synthesis of Campion's ineluctable eccentricities with a humble tribute to someone else's spirit and voice. Unusual for film or television.


Photo © 1990 Hibiscus Films/New Zealand Film Commission/
Television New Zealand/Australian Broadcasting Corporation/
Channel Four Films, © 1991 Fine Line Features
I can no longer get behind this very early piece, written after I first saw the film in early 1999 and wasn't expecting what struck my college-age eyes as overly muted direction from my bold heroine in art and life, Jane Campion. One day I'd love to write more about Angel, though the following Letterboxd post from 2022 suggests how much my admiration has boomed.

Rarely has any movie felt more like a love letter to its main character—particularly one whom another film might have rendered as drab, as "crazy," as a victim, as a figure for simplistic adulation, or as too internalized to ever get to know. The degree of difficulty here is very high, from the shaky, recessive, insecure protagonist to the multinational scale of production to the belief-beggaring pile-up of tragic life events to the script's gutsy approach of sidelining a lot of Frame's work in favor of a close, direct, compassionate, but unsentimental portrait of the woman.

Campion is working with so many team members here who would become stalwarts across different projects (d.p. Stuart Dryburgh, editor Veronika Jenet, production designer Grant Major), all of whom contribute their eccentric talents but never in ways that privilege Campion's spiky signature over Frame's softer but still-unusual point of view. The whole intimate epic is quietly majestic, visually inspired, carefully paced, and inordinately moving. I'll admit it was the one Campion movie I didn't really "get" when I first saw it as a college student, and now it's among my most cherished of her features... though that's admittedly a large group! Grade: A–

(in February 1999: C+)
Awards:
Venice Film Festival: Grand Special Jury Prize; Little Golden Lion; OCIC Award
Toronto International Film Festival: International Critics' Award
Independent Spirit Awards: Best Foreign Film
Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Foreign Language Film (??)
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